Smart e-Patch for drugs monitoring in schizophrenia

Personalized medicine is experiencing an unprecedented growth in part driven by transformative advances in novel diagnostics tools helping both patients and healthcare professionals with prevention, detection, diagnosis, follow-up, and decision making. t. Biosensors (both implantable and wearable) are an important tool in this space providing direct detection of disease markers and therapeutic drugs. Perspiration analysis offers multiple differentiation opportunities for biosensor design due to the facts that it doesn't require invasive sampling and that mounting evidence to date support the relevance of relevant biomarkers in sweat too. While there is an ongoing research on wearable biosensors for sweat analysis, there is not any report so far on drug detection on the skin. In the present paper, we propose the new idea of a smart e-Patch with integrated electrochemical sensor designed for detection of a novel compound (F17464) developed by Pierre Fabre for the treatment of schizophrenia. This e-Patch is designed for continuous monitoring of drug intake of patients via monitoring of the drug concentration in their perspiration. Our preliminary studies performed to detect this drug in perspiration liquid showed that a direct detection is feasible with a limit of detection of 0.82 μM despite the presence of other electroactive interfering compounds in the perspiration. It is also shown that the designed biosensor is selective for F17464 even when the drug is in presence of a potentially co-administered product (compound B).